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Comment by hawkharris | Hacker News Reader

The author argues against the pursuit of wealth on the grounds that the pursuers do not help people.

In fact, being rich is the single best way to help people.

Being rich expands your reach as an individual. It allows you to fund initiatives that revitalize entire communities: building homes, providing medicine, contributing to science, technology, arts and culture. Bill Gates has fundamentally changed more people's lives than a million middle-class volunteers combined.

If your goal is to help people on a large scale and in a concrete, measurable way, getting rich should be one of your first priorities in life.

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Being rich is an arguably necessary but absolutely not sufficient condition for being better able to help people.

But, then again, the fact that we live in a world that has rich people (wealth disparity) is a fundamental part of why so many people need the help those rich people are often better able to provide in the first place. In that light, the solution is, in fact, a consequence of the problem it's supposed to be solving.

> If your goal is to help people on a large scale and in a concrete, measurable way, getting rich should be one of your first priorities in life.

Or... you could also get a job at a non-profit / NGO / etc. Or you could work on trying to improve government programs so that the social safety net is more efficient and more effective.

Getting rich and doing philanthropy is certainly one way to raise money, but there are other ways to improve the world that don't involve immense personal gain as a first step.

Managing other people's money (what NGOs/state do) requires that somebody will pay that money (taxes etc). Those are not interchangeable roles.

Not sure what you're trying to say. Are you saying that for NGOs/governments to be effective, everyone needs to focus on getting personally rich to maximize how much money they can give via donations / taxes?

>In fact, being rich is the single best way to help people.

Having empathy is key. Being rich alone doesn't help anyone.

In the capitalist state that we live in perhaps you are right, but if there wasn't such an economic divide in the world, that may not stick. In order to get rich in the capitalist state you essentially have to displace capital from others, who could be the very people that you end up helping in the end.

> Bill Gates has fundamentally changed more people's lives than a million middle-class volunteers combined.

Data?

http://www.gatesfoundation.org/

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